(*both laugh*) Episode 39: Max Collins from Eve 6!!

tl/dr: we asked Max Collins from Eve 6 if he wanted to chat and he said sure!

This episode is going live on May 27, which coincidentally marks the 21st anniversary of the first time I saw Eve 6. It was the 2000 WBCN (r.i.p.) River Rave and it took place at the old Foxboro Stadium and it featured bands like Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Everclear and Godsmack (lol) and Stone Temple Pilots and Static-X and Powerman 5000 and Cypress Hill. The turn of the century was a time, man...

ANYWAY, Eve 6, in my opinion, got a little unfairly lumped in with a couple of scenes that, stylistically, they weren't really a part of. Their self-titled debut album, written while the band's members (Max Collins, Jon Siebel, Tony Fagenson) were essentially still in high school, debuted at a time in music that was probably just a bit too late for the punk revival of the mid-90s and just before the nu-metal/butt rock wave of the early 2000s. Stylistically, the band probably had more in common with Alkaline Trio (whose own debut full-length came out six months after "Eve 6) than with the likes of either Third Eye Blind or Sugar Ray or Staind or whoever they got paired with along the way. The lead single, "Inside Out," (aka "The Heart In A Blender Song") blew up and the album sold almost two million copies and so school buses turned into tour buses before very long and, well, here's the 25-cent version of what happened next: sophomore album, Horrorscope, spawned an unlikely hit ("Here's To The Night") which was probably your prom and/or graduation song if you're of a certain age, touring with Bon Jovi, third album didn't spawn a likely/unlikely "hit", band got dropped by RCA and essentially broke up, Max got sober, band reconnected, new album in 2012, bunch of 90s-band style tours, pandemic.

The last year or so have found Collins and Siebel and new drummer Ben Hilzinger started working on new material, the result of which is a five-song EP, "grim value," which is due out next month (see links to the first couple videos below). It's also seen Collins reach a new level of sorta-fame via Twitter, where he's maintained the band's official feed as a mix of 90s-band shit-posting and progressive realist light-in-the-darkness (Much of it is aligned with the dance-pop self-help spiritual guru Chevy Mustang that Collins created that is, if you haven't checked it out yet, completely brilliant.) We talked about all of this and more (Jawbreaker, sobriety, touring with Bon Jovi, etc) over the course of this chat and it was super fun and I still find it amazing that he agreed to do it.

Pre-order "grim value" here: http://grimvalue.com/

New video "black nova" here: https://youtu.be/9nLJ4Y9t98c

Newer Juggalo-rific video "Can We Combine" here: https://youtu.be/9nLJ4Y9t98c

Chevy Mustang - "I Don't Care" video here: https://youtu.be/cu0x8_kN81I

Intro song, as always: "Hurts To Laugh" by Kali Masi